Skelton found that “one of the dominant characteristics of the officer corps was internal dissension; indeed, seldom has an army been led by a more refractory and contentious group of men. That officer was a rarity whose career was not punctuated by acts of indiscipline and acrimonious controversies with his comrades-in-arms, many of which led to courts-martial or duels.”15 One cause was the isolation and boredom of frontier posts. This was exacerbated because the officer corps was one of the few places in the early republic in which Americans from a variety of regional, religious, ethnic, educational, and social backgrounds mingled in close quarters. Probably more important was the overblown sense of honor of the officers, especially those from the South.
Any officer who issued or accepted a challenge to a duel or served as a second or even upbraided a fellow officer for refusing a challenge was subject to immediate dismissal. In practice, neither the War Department nor senior officers made the slightest effort to enforce these regulations. General Anthony Wayne, in fact, urged his officers to duel, telling them to find “some other mode of settling their private disputes” than by troubling the army with courts-martial. There was a logic at work: duels avoided the expense and inconvenience of frequent courts-martial, and, in contrast to duels, courts-martial tended to perpetuate rather than resolve the frequent personal disputes.16
In the army of 1795, one officer declared, to be publicly insulted—denounced as not a gentleman in the presence of other officers—and not to seek redress in a duel would subject the insulted party “to the scoff and ridicule, and what is worse the contempt of his brothers in arms.”17
•
Ensign Meriwether Lewis’s first posting as an officer of the regular army was to the Second Sub-Legion, under General Wayne. Thus Lewis was present at Wayne’s headquarters on August 3, 1795, when the humbled chiefs of the tribes of the Ohio region gave their assent to the Treaty of Greenville. In November, a fever swept through the camp; at one point some 300 of the 375 men at Greenville were sick. Lewis was one of the fortunate; he assured his mother, “I enjoy perfect health.”18
Although there were as yet no formal political parties in the United States, most officers in the Second Sub-Legion, like the officer corps as a whole, were Federalists. One of the most contentious political issues of the day was attitudes toward the French Revolution. Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, despised it. Jeffersonians—soon to be known as Republicans—embraced it. Embraced it so thoroughly, in fact, that many of them copied the French and used the simple title “citizen” in addressing one another. Lewis was one of these; he addressed his May 22, 1795, letter to his mother: “Cittizen Lucy Markes, Albemarle, Virginia.”
Lewis’s views—and his drinking—soon got him into trouble. On November 6, 1795, he was brought before a General Courts Martial at Wayne’s headquarters. Charges were brought against him by a Lieutenant Eliott. The first charge: “A direct, open & contemptuous Violation of the first & second Articles of the seventh section of the Rules and Articles of War.” (Article one read, “No officer or soldier shall use any reproachful or provoking speeches or gestures to another.” Article two forbade challenging to a duel.)
The specification in the proceeding charged Lewis with “abruptly, and in an Ungentleman like mannner, when intoxicated, entering his (Lieutenant Eliott’s) House on the 24th of September last, and without provocation insulting him, and disturbing the peace and harmony of a Company of Officers whom he had invited there.” They had argued politics; Lewis had apparently been thrown out; he then “presumed on the same day to send Lieutenant Eliott a Challenge to fight a duell.”
When the charges were read to Lewis, he entered a plea of “Not Guilty.” Testimony was taken, over a period of nearly a week. The officers of the court then rendered their judgment: “We are of opinion that Ensign Meriwether Lewis is not guilty of the charges exhibited against him, and sentence that he may be acquitted with honor.” General Wayne, the court-martial report concluded,
confirms the foregoing sentence and fondly hopes, as this is the first, that it also may be the last instance in [this command] of convening a Court for a trial of this nature—
Ensign Meriwether Lewis is liberated from his Arrest.19
Quite obviously, Ensign Lewis could not continue to serve in the same outfit as Lieutenant Eliott. General Wayne transfered the twenty-one-year-old Lewis to the Chosen Rifle Company of elite riflemen-sharpshooters. The captain of that company had Albemarle ties—his family came from Charlottesville, although he had been born in Caroline County, Virginia, four years earlier than Lewis. His name was William Clark. His older brother was General George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Old Northwest during the revolution and a close friend of Jefferson. In the fall of 1795, William Clark had been in the army four years and taken part in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. In six months, he would resign his commission because of ill-health and the press of family business, but during that half-year he and Lewis became great friends, and admirers one of the other.
William Clark, oil (1810) by Charles Willson Peale. (Courtesy Independence National Historical Park)
So the partnership of Lewis and Clark, destined to become the most famous in American history, began because General Wayne preferred to have his officers fight out their differences in a duel rather than in a court-martial and therefore found for the man who had issued the challenge rather than the one who had followed the law and brought charges.
Two weeks after his release from arrest, Lewis wrote his mother. He said his promised trip home for a visit had proved “impracticable.” He issued instructions for his stepbrother: “I desire that Jack may be sent to Mr. Maury as soon as he shall have learnt to read tollerably well, being determaned that he shall receive a liberal education if at my own expense,” certainly a generous gesture and another indication of how much he valued education.
As to his difficulties with the code of conduct of an officer, Lewis took them in his stride. “The general idea is that the army is the school of debauchery,” he wrote, “but believe me it has ever proven the school of experience and prudence to your affectionate son.” He was apparently learning to be less provocative in his politics, however: he addressed the letter to “Mrs. Lucy Marks,” not “Cittizen Lucy Markes” (he never could decide how to spell “Marks”).20
•
His army life over the next four years gave him enough travel to satisfy even his rambling nature. He covered vast chunks of the West, north and south of the Ohio River, beginning with a reconnaissance through Ohio in the spring of 1796. In October, he marched from Detroit to Pittsburgh with a small escort, delivering dispatches. He got lost, twice, and ran out of rations; he found some abandoned and rotting bear meat in an old Indian camp and pronounced it “very exceptable.”
In November 1796, he transferred to the First U.S. Infantry Regiment. That month he made another march from Detroit to Pittsburgh, again carrying dispatches for General Wayne. This time he did not get lost, perhaps because he was accompanied by a Wyandot Indian who probably served as a guide; the Indian’s name was Enos Coon, and Lewis paid his bill at a Pittsburgh inn.21
Following that journey, he took a furlough and rode home to Locust Hill, his first time there since he left in August 1794 promising his mother to return in six months. No anecdotes survive from the visit, but apparently he made the rounds of his old friends, after satisfying his mother’s desire to know about his adventures and arranging his business affairs at the plantation. Invited to join the Virtue Lodge Number 44 of the Masonic Order, in Albemarle, he did so on January 28, 1797. He advanced through Masonic degrees with dizzying speed; by April 3 he was the recipient of the degree of Past Master Mason.
(Because his military duties kept him out of Albemarle most of the time over the following years, he attended few lodge meetings, although he was present in June and July 1798, while on furlough. He was an officer in the lodge and that summer made a motion to earmark a portion of lodge funds for charity. By O
ctober 1799, he was a Royal Arch Mason. He apparently took the ritual and idealism of the Masons quite seriously; he later gave names taken from Masonic ritual to western rivers—Philosophy, Wisdom, and Philanthropy. William Clark joined the Masons in St. Louis in 1809.)22
Lewis’s furlough extended through the summer of 1797, during which time he settled “my domestick concerns.” He made arrangements to bring some of his mother’s slaves still in Georgia back to Virginia, made a trip to Kentucky to do some additional speculating in land—he bought twenty-six hundred acres for himself at twenty cents per acre, telling his mother, “I am much more pleased with this country than I supposed I should”—sold some of his Virginia land to his brother, Reuben, bought some of Captain Marks’s land from his mother, and generally acted as Virginia planters did in those years, making himself land-rich and cash-poor.23
In an age of powdered wigs, lace, and ruffles, he was something of a fop. In a January 15, 1798, letter to a friend, Lieutenant Ferdinand Claiborne, he complained about his tailor. “Of all the damned pieces of work,” he wrote, “my coat exceeds. It would take up three sheets of paper, written in shorthand, to point out its deficiences, or, I may even say, deformities. . . . The lace is deficient. . . . Could I have done without it I should have returned it.”
In a postscript, he made a complaint about a military matter, a complaint that virtually every officer in every army in every age has made: “No doubt you have had forwarded to you the late regulation of our generous Congress relative to the delivery and distribution of fuel and straw to the garrisons. . . . The allowance falling so far short of what is really necessary, I am at a loss to determine what steps to pursue. Do let me know what plan you adapt as I am confident the proportion of fuel is so small that the soldiers cannot subsist on it.”24
•
In 1798, John Adams was president. Thanks to Jay’s Treaty, relations with England were good, which meant that relations with France were bad. There was an undeclared war on the high seas. French Foreign Minister Talleyrand demanded a bribe from an American mission. Public opinion was outraged. Political parties were formed around these events, which ushered in one of the most bitterly partisan periods in American history. At the center of the disputes was the size of the army.
The High Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, hoped to use the crisis of a threatened war with France to build a classic European-style standing army, meaning one designed more to suppress internal dissent than to repel foreign invasion. Hamilton, and to a lesser extent Washington and Adams, who were not High Federalists, regarded the Republican opposition to government policy, led by Jefferson, as illegitimate, even treasonous—an attitude that led to the Alien and Sedition Acts.
In July 1798, the Federalist-controlled Congress voted for a huge increase in the army, authorizing as many as ten thousand regulars and thirty thousand militia.25 To President Adams and other Federalist leaders, the appointment of men of “sound” politics to the officer corps of the new army was crucial, if that army was to provide a reliable check on internal disorder. As active politicians, Adams and his friends were also aware of the vast patronage possibilities in the expansion of the army. But the Federalist Party was divided internally between Hamilton’s High Federalist faction and Adams’s supporters, so a struggle for power lay ahead.
Adams appointed Washington to command the new army, with the rank of lieutenant general. Washington, reluctant to end his retirement, did so only partially, for he insisted on remaining at Mount Vernon until war actually began. That decision meant that the second-in-command would have effective control of the new army. A series of Cabinet intrigues followed that soon embroiled Adams and Washington in a controversy over Hamilton. Eventually Washington forced Adams to make a humiliating concession, threatening to resign unless Adams agreed to make Hamilton the second in command.
The humiliation caused Adams to have second thoughts about the expansion of the army. As a consequence, it did not grow to anything remotely approaching the authorized strength. In practice, there was a rapid increase in the officer corps, but almost none in the enlisted ranks.
That meant that Adams still had many commissions to hand out, and they were eagerly sought. Federalists naturally got the lion’s share. Washington established the criteria. He proposed giving first priority to active revolutionary veterans and the second to “young Gentlemen of good families, liberal education, and high sense of honour.” In no case, Washington told Adams, should he appoint “any who are known enemies to their own government; for they will certainly attempt to create disturbances in the Militry.”
Adams went so far in excluding applicants suspected of Republicanism that even Hamilton thought he had gone too far. Hamilton said that some at least of the junior officers should come from the opposition ranks. “It does not seem adviseable to exclude all hope & give to appointments too absolute a party feature. Military situations, on young minds particularly, are of all others best calculated to inspire a zeal for the service and the cause in which the Incumbants are employed.”26 In other words, young Republicans of promise and talent could be won over if given a commission.
Adams tended to ignore Hamilton; the vast majority of appointments went to Federalists. Even though they were officers without an army, their political orientation struck fear in the hearts of the Republicans, who talked, somewhat wildly, about the coming Federalist terror.
•
The involvement of the army in politics and the use of the officer corps as a major patronage source was destined to have a decisive impact on Meriwether Lewis. It began with a promotion. On March 3, 1799, he became a lieutenant and was posted to recruiting duty in Charlottesville, which must have pleased his mother.
After Adams made his decision to ignore the authorization to increase the enlisted ranks of the army by several thousand, Lewis’s recruiting duties ran out. In 1800 he was posted to Detroit, where he joined a company commanded by his friend Captain Claiborne. It was a presidential-election year, with Jefferson challenging Adams. Lewis indulged in vigorous political argument, on at least one occasion exchanging hot words with a Federalist officer and overwhelming—at least to his own satisfaction—the “Fed” with his own Jeffersonian Republican arguments.27
He shortly became regimental paymaster. This was a new post, provided for by Congress in March 1799 as part of the expansion. He got the appointment, Jefferson later wrote, because he always attracted “the first attention where punctuality & fidelity were requisite.”28
It was an ideal posting for Lewis, for two reasons. The first was personal—his duties gave him a veritable carte blanche for rambling. The second was political—the rambling gave him an opportunity to get to know the officers scattered throughout the West, and to assess their political views, thereby acquiring knowledge that soon became a great asset.
He roamed the West, up and down the Ohio River—Cincinnati, Fort Wayne, Limestone, Maysville, Chillicothe, Wheeling—on a twenty-one-foot bateau, or keelboat, and a pirogue. He learned the craft of a waterman on western rivers. He traveled by horseback to forts south of the Ohio, riding through the wilderness carrying large sums in banknotes—not hard currency, which was too bulky. He kept extensive records—transfers, AWOLs, deserters, recruits. He established a reputation for thoroughness, accuracy, and honesty.
On December 5, 1800, Lewis was promoted to captain. That month the states selected their delegates to the Electoral College. In February 1801, those delegates created a political crisis when the count came out seventy-three votes each for Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr of New York, with sixty-five votes for Adams. The tie threw the election into the House of Representatives, where another deadlock followed, as the Federalist caucus decided to back Burr. In other words, the Federalists would not accept the outcome of the election, in which the people’s choice of Jefferson was clear.
So intense was the partisanship of the day, so much did the Federalists hate and fear Jefferson, that they were ready to
turn the country over to Aaron Burr. Had they succeeded and made Burr the president, there would almost certainly be no republic today. Fortunately for all, Hamilton was smart enough and honest enough to realize that Jefferson was the lesser evil. He used his influence to break the deadlock. On the thirty-sixth ballot, February 17, 1801, Jefferson was chosen president and Burr was elected vice-president.
It was an age marked by a certain extravagance of language. What the alarmists among the Federalists feared, they said, was “the general ascendancy of the worthless, the dishonest, the rapacious, the vile, the merciless and the ungodly.”29 Such sentiments emboldened Adams to radical measures. On March 3, hours before Jefferon’s inaugural, Adams made his famous “midnight appointments,” stuffing the federal courts with Federalist judges. Not so well known but equally outrageous—at least to the Republicans—was his commissioning of eighty-seven men to fill vacancies in the six regiments of the permanent military establishment. Virtually all were Federalists, thus guaranteeing that the army—like the courts—would remain predominantly Federalist for years to come.30
Or so, at least, Adams hoped. President Jefferson had other ideas. To implement them, he turned to his neighbor Captain Meriwether Lewis of the First Infantry.
CHAPTER FOUR
Thomas Jefferson’s America
1801
When Thomas Jefferson took the Oath of Office as the third president of the United States on March 4, 1801, the nation contained 5,308,483 persons. Nearly one out of five was a Negro slave. Although the boundaries stretched from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, from the Great Lakes nearly to the Gulf of Mexico (roughly a thousand miles by a thousand miles), only a relatively small area was occupied. Two-thirds of the people lived within fifty miles of tidewater. Only four roads crossed the Appalachian Mountains, one from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, another from the Potomac to the Monongahela River, a third through Virginia southwestward to Knoxville, Tennessee, and the fourth through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.
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